urxvt slow?

smoon · 2005-08-23 18:28:50

Hi all!

I'm using Arch for two days now and it's a great distribution, I really like it. I have one problem that is really annoying me though: My terminal emulator of choice is urxvt (rxvt-unicode) since I discovered it a year or so ago. I chose it because it was very fast, has nice looking anti-aliased fonts and supports unicode.
But now with Arch, urxvt feels so damn slow that even gnome-terminal is faster here (I always thought gnome-terminal was the slowest terminal on earth, at least it was on all other distributions I tried). For example if I maximize it vertically and do an `ls -la' (340 lines...) it takes almost two seconds to finish. If I switch to another desktop and switch back to the one where urxvt is running I can watch it redrawing the lines.

This is what my ${HOME}/.Xdefaults says about urxvt:

urxvt*geometry: 80x24
urxvt*font: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:style=roman:pixelsize=11
urxvt*boldFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:style=bold:pixelsize=11
urxvt*italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:style=italic:pixelsize=11
urxvt*jumpScroll: true
urxvt*internalBorder: 0
urxvt*externalBorder: 0
urxvt*scrollBar: false
urxvt*saveLines: 4096
urxvt*background: #f5f5f5
urxvt*foreground: #000000

This are the exact same settings I was using with previous distributions.
Has anyone an idea what could be wrong or why it runs so slow for me? Or maybe anyone has the same problem? Maybe it's a new version of rxvt-unicode that comes with Arch which has a bug or something? pacman says I've version 5.7-3 installed and I just checked, I were using 5.3 before...

phrakture · 2005-08-23 18:38:44

Here's the changelog from version 5.3 to 5.7:
http://dist.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/Changes

There were a bunch of changes to font handling... which is to be expected. I'd suggest trying the same thing without using an Xft font (try fixed), and see if that's the issue...

The thing is, the fancier you get with transparency and wide characters and AA fonts, the slower it becomes...

smoon · 2005-08-23 19:15:02

Ok, I tested it with fixed font without aa and it runs really fast this way. I as well installed mrxvt and tried xft fonts with it and it runs just as slow as urxvt.

But I still don't get it, that gnome-terminal runs so much faster (but still not as fast as I'm used to with urxvt). Something is really screwed up here IMHO.

phrakture · 2005-08-23 19:21:54

Does gnome-terminal support Xft fonts?
If so (assuming you're capable), I'd take a look at the sources, to see if there's anything that can be done to the font drawing.

smoon · 2005-08-23 21:09:51

phrakture wrote:

Does gnome-terminal support Xft fonts?
If so (assuming you're capable), I'd take a look at the sources, to see if there's anything that can be done to the font drawing.

As far as I can tell gnome-terminal uses Xft for font rendering as well, but I'm not sure since I'm somewhat lost with all this font stuff (Pango, Xft, fontconfig, freetype, ...). Maybe I'll have a look at the sources tomorrow.
But what is weird is that gnome-font-viewer segfaults on almost every font I give it. I was only able to make it show "fixed", all truetype fonts crashed it.
I'm almost sure some libraries or something is badly messed up.

Evanlec · 2008-03-03 07:48:18

i know this thread is pretty old but has anyone solved this yet?
I am experiencing the exact same issue

urxvt is slow with xft and aa fonts (its okay with bitmap fonts like terminus or such)
gnome-terminal seems to be able to use xft (dont know if it uses aa or not) and draws them very quickly by comparison

but i hate gnome-terminal...i want to use urxvt

oliwer · 2008-03-03 16:29:21

Does this work for you ? http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 18#p297418

Just checking...

axion419 · 2008-03-03 18:56:25

have you tried using sakura? its a terminal, based on the vte library's like gnome, but its no where near as clunky and dependcy filled. I find it runs faster than everything but xterm.

http://www.pleyades.net/david/sakura.php

Last edited by axion419 (2008-03-03 18:56:41)

Evanlec · 2008-03-05 21:43:11

axion419 wrote:

have you tried using sakura? its a terminal, based on the vte library's like gnome, but its no where near as clunky and dependcy filled. I find it runs faster than everything but xterm.
http://www.pleyades.net/david/sakura.php

Yes I tried this and several other emulators, like Konsole, Terminal (XFCE), roxterm, and some others...
All of these terminal emulators seem to use the VTE engine for rendering fonts, and while speedy it doesnt look very good.
also, all of these emulators with GUI configs dont want to read .Xdefaults and therefore I cannot get them to display fonts the way i want them as in urxvt...

Arch Linux

#1 2005-08-23 18:28:50

urxvt slow?

#2 2005-08-23 18:38:44

Re: urxvt slow?

#3 2005-08-23 19:15:02

Re: urxvt slow?

#4 2005-08-23 19:21:54

Re: urxvt slow?

#5 2005-08-23 21:09:51

Re: urxvt slow?

#6 2008-03-03 07:48:18

Re: urxvt slow?

#7 2008-03-03 16:29:21

Re: urxvt slow?

#8 2008-03-03 18:56:25

Re: urxvt slow?

#9 2008-03-05 21:43:11

Re: urxvt slow?

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